I should be doing some laundry.  But I'll probably not get around to it until this weekend.

I used to bartend for a living years ago and I don't anymore, but I still like mixing drinks and I often do so at home.

I thought it'd be cool if we had a thread made up of nothing but interesting and tasty drink recipes.

I'll start this off with one I posted already today.  I don't have a name for it though.  Any suggestions?

Demo's "Fruity With A Kick" cocktail, a.k.a., "The Xolik"

Ingredients
1 part vodka
1 part Maker's Mark
1 part TripleSec
3 parts pineapple juice
1 orange slice, quartered

Pour the liquor and the pineapple juice into a shaker with some ice.  Shake thoroughly.  Pour into a tall glass over ice and the orange pieces.

Enjoy!



EDIT to add the name

I noticed that a squatter seems to own Hackernetwork.com now, and it appears that he sold Flashplayer.com to UGO.

The Hackernetwork domain is for sale for $5000 minimum... I wonder if the squatter paid him what he was asking and is looking to make some money on it.

If that's the case, said squatter is an idiot.   

So anyone heard from our old friend Billy?

We haven't done this in a while.  Link them if they're large, please.

Here's my laptop:

Click

Reimero and I wrote a module that was used as the 2005 GenCon HackMaster World Championship Tournament.  Afterward, Kenzer & Co. picked it up for publication.

Well, after a long wait, it's finally on its way in print.  We're pretty proud of it; we put a lot of time and effort into it and it turned out even better than we'd hoped.

If you're into that sort of thing, it's available from the K&C website, here.   

Lately I've been watchening Charmed.  TNT runs 4 episodes a day though, and Tivo grabs all of them.

I can't keep up.

Weird Tingly Feeling, people.  Did this forum die off while I wasn't posting?

Place is a friggin ghost town.   

A couple of friends of mine and I are starting an Alice In Chains tribute band.  We can't decide on a name though.

I've a few ideas we've tossed around and I'm curious to see what you guys think sounds best.  I'll reserve my own preferences until I get a few votes.

I just got one of these.  It arrived yesterday to replace my old one (which was a Gmini 400 I bought a few years ago, got good use out of, and then declared dead after the battery started crapping out and the hard drive finally gave up the ghost a few weeks ago on it).

This one is essentially like my old one, except it doesn't handle video -- a feature I admittedly didn't use on my Gmini 400 anyway -- and has a much less power-hungry screen, so it has much better battery life.  My Gmini 400 could get (at its best) about 10 hours of life on battery for audio only, but that was only if I never touched the thing.  No skipping of songs, no doing anything that would light up the screen's backlight.

And once the device had started to age a bit, that battery life went down considerably.  More recently I could expect about 2 or 3 hours out of it on a charge, considerably less if I wasn't very efficient about my playlist loading or listening habits.

My new one can get around 17 hours on one charge according to Archos, which seems to be fairly accurate... I've had it on all day and it's still got more than half its charge left.  Add to that the fact that I've been fiddling around with it and creating playlists and jumping from album to album in it.

Here's my breakdown of my experience so far with it:

• Price.  With shipping, the Gmini XS202s cost me $232 US, which I consider very reasonable for what I'm getting.
• 20 GB hard drive.  My old one was also 20 GB, so everything I was already carrying around fit on this one as well.  I've got about 17 GB of music on it right now, which is around 2900 songs.
• Sound quality.  Unlike the Gmini 400, the XS202s has equalizer presets ("Rock", "Techno", "Concert", et al) and a full equalizer to play around with.  The Gmini 400 only had the basics (bass, treble, balance, volume, yawn).  As a result, I have fine-tuned this device to sound quite a bit nicer than my old player, which is saying a lot, because despite the setting limitations on the old one, the old device sounded really good to my audiophile ears.
• Interface.  The controls on the XS202s are quite different from the Gmini 400, but I find them even easier to use.  Without consulting the instructions, and just by fiddling around with the device itself, I figured out how to navigate, build playlists, and even update the firmware in only a couple of minutes.  This is one thing that I think Archos has on Apple... I don't care how many people rave about iPods, I HATE the interface on them.  I find iPods to be clumsy, counter-intuitive, and confusing.  The interface on the Archos players is a lot easier to figure out and get used to using in my opinion.  I know I'm probably the only person on the planet that thinks that, but that's a plus for Archos in my book.
• Physical attributes.  The XS202s is a tiny little player for a hard drive based portable music device.  It's 2.3"x0.7"x2.9" and fits easily and comfortably in the palm of my hand.  The shell is a sleek black metal with a brushed surface that resists smudging and scuffing.  The screen is a 2-inch square, to which I easily applied a PDA screen protector sheet that I cut down with a pair of scissors.  The device as an overall feels very sturdy and durable, and considering the amount of abuse I put this player's predecessor through, I'm sure that perception is spot on.

I noticed that there's a Wikipedia article on "Sneakernet".  It's kind of funny.  Clack hear.

I like this part:

Sneakernets can achieve tremendous throughput, but they suffer from high latency; see comparison of latency and throughput for more information on the difference between the two.

The throughput of the network is directly proportional to the size of the transmitted file(s). Latency is based on the amount of time it takes to fully process the request for information. Latency would include the time it takes to write the storage media and the time to travel from point A to point B.

For example: Person A requested Person B to send him a DVD (4.7GB) worth of information. Over the Internet the latency for the file request may be milliseconds but at a modest broadband download speed of 50kB/s it may take up to a day to complete the transfer. On the other hand Person B could burn a DVD and deliver it to Person A in an hour. The latency was an hour but the throughput of the transfer is roughly equal to a transfer rate of 1305kB/s.

 

Anyone used this before?  It looks like a timesaver.  I don't deal with this as much anymore, but in my old job any time we got any new laptops they got handed over to me first to clean up, install our AV and a few other programs that were needed, and to check out. 

I wish I'd known about this tool then.

D'oh, I use this on my laptop.

OMG CLACK HEAR

I should probably install the patch they've released.  From the sound of it, everyone should, if they're using MadWifi to get an Atheros chipset running under Linux.

I'm giving serious contemplation to buying this.

Anyone have any zealous opinions on LCD monitors?